The disclosed embodiments relate generally to portable electronic devices, and more particularly, to portable electronic devices that display filtered images on a touch screen display.
As portable electronic devices have become more compact, and the number of functions able to be performed by a given device has steadily increased, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with such multifunctional devices. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable electronic devices, which have much smaller screens than typical desktop or laptop computers.
As such, some portable electronic devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have employed touch-sensitive displays (also known as a “touch screens”) with a graphical user interface (GUI), one or more processors, memory and one or more modules, programs or sets of instructions stored in the memory for performing multiple functions. In some embodiments, the user interacts with the GUI primarily through finger contacts and gestures on the touch-sensitive display. In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital video recording, web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing. Instructions for performing these functions may be included in a computer readable storage medium or other computer program product configured for execution by one or more processors.
Touch-sensitive displays can provide portable electronic devices with the ability to present transparent and intuitive user interfaces for viewing and navigating GUIs and multimedia content. Such interfaces can increase the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction with activities like digital photography on portable electronic devices. In particular, portable electronic devices used for digital photography and digital video may provide the user with the ability perform various image processing techniques, such as filtering, focusing, exposing, optimizing, or otherwise adjusting captured images—either in real time as the image frames are being captured by the portable electronic device's image sensor or after the image has been stored in the device's memory.
As image processing capabilities of portable electronic devices continue to expand and become more complex, software developers of client applications for such portable electronic devices increasingly need to understand how the various inputs and states of the device should be translated into input parameters for the image processing routines. As a simple example, consider a single tap gesture at a particular coordinate (x, y) on a touch screen. One example of translating the input point location of (x, y) to an “auto focus” image processing routine would be to cause the coordinate (x, y) to serve as the center of a rectangular box over which the image sensor will attempt to focus for the next captured image frame. With more complex image processing routines, however, such as graphically intensive image filters, the number and type of inputs, as well as logical considerations regarding the orientation of the device and other factors may become too complex for client software applications to readily be able to interpret and/or process correctly.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques to implement a programmatic interface to map particular user interactions, e.g., gestures, to the input parameters of various image processing routines, e.g., image filters, in a way that provides a seamless, dynamic, and intuitive experience for both the user and the client application software developer.